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Description
We present empirical measurements of the radii of 116 stars that host transiting planets. These radii are determined using only direct observables - the bolometric flux at Earth, the effective temperature, and the parallax provided by the Gaia first data release - and thus are virtually model independent, with extinction being the only free parameter. We also determine each star's mass using our newly determined radius and the stellar density, a virtually model independent quantity itself from previously published transit analyses. These stellar radii and masses are in turn used to redetermine the transiting-planet radii and masses, again using only direct observables. The median uncertainties on the stellar radii and masses are 8% and 30%, respectively, and the resulting uncertainties on the planet radii and masses are 9% and 22%, respectively. These accuracies are generally larger than previously published model-dependent precisions of 5% and 6% on the planet radii and masses, respectively, but the newly determined values are purely empirical. We additionally report radii for 242 stars hosting radial-velocity (non-transiting) planets, with a median achieved accuracy of ~2%. Using our empirical stellar masses we verify that the majority of putative "retired A stars" in the sample are indeed more massive than ~1.2 M_{sun}_. Most importantly, the bolometric fluxes and angular radii reported here for a total of 498 planet host stars-with median accuracies of 1.7% and 1.8%, respectively-serve as a fundamental data set to permit the re-determination of transiting-planet radii and masses with the Gaia second data release to ~3% and ~5% accuracy, better than currently published precisions, and determined in an entirely empirical fashion.
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